Bruce Fink There's No Such Thing as a Sexual Relationship

NFF Spring/Fall 1991, Volume 5, Numbers 1 & 2

Bruce Fink

"There's No Such Thing as a Sexual Relationship"

Existence and the Formulas of Sexuation1

" . . . l'être parlant - ce qui est un pléonasme,

parce qu'il n'y a d'être que de parler s'il n'y avait

pas le verbe être, il n'y aurait pas d'être du tout"

(Sem. XXI, Les non-dupes errent, January 15, 1974).

" . . . what we cannot speak about we must

pass over in silence", Wittgenstein, Tractatus

Logico-Philosophicus (Routledge & Kegan

Paul, New York, 1961, p. 151).

"Si quelque chose existe à quelque chose, c'est très

précisément de n'y être pas couplé, d'en être

"troisé", Si vous me permettez ce néologisme

(Sem. XXI, Les non-dupes errent, March 19,1974).

The Buddhist logician, Nagarjuna, when talking about something close to our interests as stu-

dents of psychoanalysis--nirvana (related in Freud's work to the pleasure principle and in Lacan's

to jouissance)--wrote:

3. Nirvana has been said to be neither eliminated nor attained,

neither annihilated nor etemal,

Neither disappeared nor originated.

4. Nirvana is certainly not an existing thing, for then it would

be characterized by old age and death.

In consequence it would involve the error that an existing thing would not become old

and be without death.

5. And if nirvana is an existing thing, nirvana would be a

constructed product (samskrta),

Since never ever has an existing thing been found to be a non-constructed-product

(asamskrta) . . . .

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17. It is not expressed if the Glorious One [the Buddha] exists after his death,

Or does not exist, or both or neither.

18. Also, it is not expressed if the Glorious One exists while remaining [in the world],

Or does not exist, or both or neither.

24. . . . No dharma [element, factor, truth] anywhere has been taught by the Buddha of

anything.2

According to Nagarjuna, Buddha never said anything about nirvana. Nirvana cannot be

affirmed to exist as nothing can be said of nirvana. Yet it clearly plays an important role in


Buddhism. While all worldly pursuits are discredited and all desires are to be extinguished,

nirvana nevertheless has a certain moment or weight.

Now what is the relationship between the paradoxical status of nirvana in Buddhism and

Lacan's claims that there is no such thing as a sexual relationship? that Woman does not exist?

that the Other jouissance cannot be said to exist?

In Buddhist logic, it is not simply nirvana that is claimed not to exist: every thing

succumbs to the same fate. Like many other philosophers of his time (c. 200 A.D.), Nagarjuna

set out to show the vanity of language, the absurdity of all our categories, and the enormity of all

assertions.3 A similar concern was expressed by Greek and Roman skeptics who employed so-

phistic argumentation to show the vanity of all theories, the indefensibility of all assertions, and

thus the worthlessness of human reason. Both the Buddhists and skeptics resorted to indifference

to all things and non-attachment as the answer to this conundrum. The essential point made by

both schools can be translated very simply in Lacanian terms: the Other is lacking, nothing guar-

antees the veracity of our statements, language lies, there is no absolute knowledge, the Other is

barred (�).4

The upshot of Buddhism and skepticism is that we can affirm neither the existence nor

the non-existence of anything. Language is so untrustworthy as a tool for thought that nothing at

all can be said to exist or not exist.

Priority of Reality

As radical as this perspective may seem, it nevertheless begins with some sort of supposed ex-

temal reality to which our language might or might not correspond, the skeptic's view being

either that it

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ultimately does not correspond, or that we can't know whether or not it corresponds. In other

words, Buddhism and skepticism seem nevertheless to ascribe to the correspondence theory of

truth, an epistemological view that has been near and dear to so many philosophers throughout

history Reality is out there; language and science must try to correspond to it (in French the term

is adequation, implying that the language we use to talk about reality should be adequate, should

adequately describe what is really out there). Reality is thus logically prior.

Reality Language

The skeptic's view is that different languages do not divide up reality in different ways, as

Saussure would have it, for we have no guarantee that language corresponds to reality at all.

While truth, to the skeptic, consists by definition in such a perfect correspondence, the problem

is that, in the absence of any guarantee, truth remains inaccessible.

Priority of LanguageLacan's view is that the correspondence theory of truth puts the epistemological cart before the

horse. For language is what determines reality. Things only exist insofar as we can talk about


them, insofar as our symbolic order names them and creates a space for them. Words bring

things into being. In order for something to exist, it must be speakable, articulable in words. Thus

our universe of discourse--our linguistic horizon defines what exists. La paix du soir (the peace-

fulness of the evening) exists for a French speaking subject, has a kind of existential weight in

the world, whereas for a non-French-speaking subject it has none.5

Language Reality

It is through the act of naming that something comes into being. In u sense it was not before; it

did not exist. Naming cuts into the real--a sort of unhewn, undifferentiated stuff--and makes

away with part of it. Metaphorically speaking, it drains away part of the real, bringing it into

language, thereby killing it in a sense, yet at the same time bringing it into being for us in the

form of signifiers, words we can talk with.

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Existence and Ex-sistence

N'existe que ce qui peut se dire. N'ex-iste que ce qui peut

s'écrire.

When Lacan says of the Other jouissance experienced by certain people that it does not exist, he

means that it does not have a place in our symbolic universe, it cannot be spoken, it is ineffable.

In Seminar XX, Encore, Lacan associates that Other jouissance with saints and their mystical

rapture. Consider the following passage from St. John of the Cross:

I Entered I Know Not Where

I entered I know not where

and stayed not knowing

all science transcending.

I knew not where I entered

but when there I saw myself

without knowing where I was

I understood many things;

I will not say what I felt

for I stayed not knowing


In peace and pity

the science was perfected

in profound solitude

understood directly;

it was something so secret

that I stayed stammering



I was so penetrated

so absorbed, so enraptured

that my sense remained

of all feeling denuded,

and my spirit endowed

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of an understanding without understanding


He who truly arrives there

fades from himself

all that he knew before

utterly vile seems it

and his science waxes as

he stays unknowing

all science transcending. . . .6

Saint John of the Cross' experience is beyond words, beyond articulation, beyond ex-

pression in a language communicable to others.7

Now Lacan, in discussing the Other jouissance,

asserts that certain people experience it and that it nevertheless has no place in the world of dis-

course. Strictly speaking, it does not exist. For existence is directly related to articulation. (Lacan

expresses this view more or less unchangingly from Seminar I on.)

What, then, is the status of this Other jouissance that cannot be asserted to exist? In the

1970s, Lacan claims that it "ex-ists": it plays a role through its insistence, as it were, from out-

side (the symbolic order). Not only is this Other jouissance experienced due to an incursion

of/from the real, but it can, moreover, be written. While it cannot be articulated or described, it

can be "inscribed," formulated in quasi-logical/mathematical terms: ��x eex. I will discuss

Lacan's "formulas" or mathemes at length further on, but the all-important distinction between

existence as having a place in the symbolic order and ex-istence as issuing and insisting from

some other place (the real) will serve us as a key to understanding Lacan's radical claim regard-

ing relationships between the sexes.

"THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS A SEXUAL RELATIONSHIP"

"L'être sexué ne s'autorise que de lui-même"

(Sem. XXI, Les non-dupes errent, April 9, 1974).8

One of Lacan's main concerns for many years was to account for why things don't seem to work

out between men and women; as an analyst, he listened all day long, year in and year out, to

people


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complaining about their relationships, their sex lives, their boyfriends, girlfriends, lovers, and

spouses. He summed up his conclusion, in the mid- to late sixties, with one of those bombshell

expressions for which he is so well known: "there's no such thing as a sexual relationship" (il n'y

a pas de rapport sexuel).9

The French wording is ambiguous in that rapports sexuels can be used to refer simply to

sexual intercourse. If a French M.D. asks you "Avez-vous des rapports sexuels," he's asking you

whether or not you are "sleeping with" or "having sex" with anyone, both of these being well-

known euphemisms in English for talking about coitus. Nevertheless, Lacan was not asserting

that people aren't having sex--a ridiculous claim to say the least; his use of the word rapport here

suggests a more "abstract" realm of ideas: relation, relationship, proportion, ratio, fraction, etc.

There is, according to Lacan, no direct relationship between men and women insofar as

they are men and women. In other words, they do not "interact" with each other as man to

woman and woman to man. Something gets in the way of their having any such relationship;

something skews their interactions.

We might think that we would have something along the lines of a relationship between

men and women if we could define them in terms of one another, if 2 times man were equal to

woman (2M = W), for example, or if they could be defined in terms of a simple complementary

inversion like activity/passivity (Freud's version, albeit unsatisfactory even to his mind). We

might even imagine associating masculinity with a sine curve and femininity with a cosine curve,

for that would allow us to formulate something we might take to be a sexual relationship as fol-

lows: sin2 + cos

2 = 1.

The advantage of this particular formula is that it seems to account, in a very graphic way, for

what Freud says in describing the different kinds of things men and women are looking for from

each other: "one forms the impression that the love of man and the love of woman are separated

by a psychological phase-difference." Here, despite the apparent heterogeneity of the masculine

and

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feminine curves, despite their phase-lag, we would be able to combine them in such a way as to

make them equal one. But according to Lacan, no such equation is possible: nothing which

would qualify as a true relationship between the sexes can be written.

There is nothing complementary about their relationship (as one might have reckoned

from a formula like x2 + y

2 = 1, where x = woman and y = man), nor is there a simple inverse

relationship or some kind of parallelism between them. Rather, each sex is defined separately

with respect to a third term. Thus there is only a non-relationship, an absence of any conceivable

direct relationship between the sexes themselves.


Lacan sets out to show (1) that the sexes are defined separately and differently, and (2)

that their partners are neither symmetrical nor overlapping. Men and women are not defined in

accordance with biological distinctions: the point is not to de scribe or formalize the charact-

eristics of those people who would be classified by a biologist as either male or female. Lacan

begins to explore a strictly psychoanalytic approach to defining men and women in Seminar

XVIII, D'un discours qui ne serait pas du semblant, and continues doing so into the mid-1970s.

This is a task of truly historic proportions, for few serious attempts have been made in the

past to define the sexes in anything but biomedical/genetic terms. Lacan's attempt may at first

seem needlessly complex and to include a great deal of "extraneous material" of Freudian origin;

one must keep in mind, however, that Lacan was inventing as he developed this new way of dis-

tinguishing between the sexes, and didn't necessarily always have a crystal clear idea of where he

was going. I will attempt first to brieny explain the main outlines of his theory, only then pro-

ceeding to a discussion of the mathemes which may pose a serious obstacle to certain readers at

the outset.10

Distinguishing Between the Sexes

According to Lacan, men and women are defined differently with respect to language, i.e. with

respect to the symbolic order. Just as Lacan's contribution to the understanding of neurosis and

psychosis suggests that the latter involves a part of the symbolic that is foreclosed and returns in

the real whereas the former does not, masculinity and femininity are defined as different kinds of

relations

65

to the symbolic order, different ways of being split by language. His formulas of sexuation thus

concern only neurotic subjects: men and women are, psychoanalytically speaking, always neur-

otic; they differ in the ways in which they are alienated by/within the symbolic order.

Men

Men are wholly alienated within language. Lacan puts it in a somewhat different way: men are

wholly determined by the "phallic function." I will tentatively identify the phallic function here

with symbolic castration, not to be confused with real castration, the loss of the male sexual or-

gan: symbolic castration is basically tantamount to what happens to a human being upon entering

the world of language, his or her alienation within language, language always saying something

other than what one wants it to mean, something more than one intends, or something less than

one would like. Thus castration here refers to the alienation of human desire that is due to the

very fact that we are forced to express our desires in words, or rather that desire itself forms

within and by means of a language we have not ourselves invented, i.e. which we have leamed

from others, and are obliged to use because others use it and understand little else. That is what

I'll take castration to mean for the time being, and the phallic function refers to the castration

brought about by our use of language, i.e. by our use of signifiers.

Lacan's major point about men can thus be expressed in a variety of ways:


• Men are wholly alienated within language.

• A man is altogether subject to symbolic castration.

• A man is completely determined by the phallic function.

Despite then the infinite permutations allowed by language in the constitution of desire, man can

be seen as bounded or finite with respect to the symbolic register. Translated in terms of desire,

the boundary is the father and his incest taboo: man's desire never goes beyond the incestuous

wish, impossible to realize, as that would involve overstepping the father's boundaries, and thus

uprooting the very "anchoring point" of neurosis le nom du père--the father's name, but also le

non du père, the father's "No!" (nom and non being homonyms in French). This is where it

appears quite clear that masculine structure is in many respects synonymous in Lacan's work

with obsessive neurosis.

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Linguistically speaking, man's limit is that which institutes the symbolic order itself, that

first signifier (S1)--the father's "No!"--which is the point of origin of the signifying chain that is

language and which is involved in primal repression: the institution of the unconscious and of a

place for the neurotic subject.

Man's pleasure is similarly limited, its boundaries being determined by the phallic func-

tion. His pleasures are limited to those allowed by the play of the signifier itself--to what Lacan

calis phallic jouissance, and to what might similarly be called symbolic jouissance. Men's fant-

asies are tied to that aspect of the real that underwrites, as it were, the symbolic order: object (a).

Object (a) keeps the symbolic moving in the same circuitous paths, in constant avoidance of the

real.11 There is, in the male camp, a kind of symbiosis between subject and object, between sym-

bolic and real, as long as the proper distance is maintained.

Women

While men are defined as being wholly hemmed in by the phallic function, wholly under the

sway of the law of the signifier, women are defined as not being wholly hemmed in. A woman is

not split in the same way as a man: though alienated, she is not altogether subject to the symbolic

order. The phallic function, while operative in her case, does not reign absolutely. With respect

to the symbolic order, a woman is not whole, bounded, or limited.

Whereas men's pleasure is altogether determined by the signifier, women's is partially

determined by the signifier, but not wholly. While men are limited to what Lacan calls phallic

jouissance, women can experience both that and another kind of jouissance, which he calls the

Other jouissance. Not that every subject who can be situated in the women's camp experiences it

--far from it, as is so often attested--but it is, according to Lacan, a structural potentiality

What is that Other jouissance of which those who, psychoanalytically speaking, are to be

classified as women are capable? The very fact that Lacan spells "Other" with a capital O here

indicates the Other jouissance's connection with the signifier, but it is connected with S1 not S2--

not with "just any" signifier, but with the "Other signifier" (to coin a phrase): the unary signifier.

Whereas S1 (the father's "No!") functions for a man as a limit to his range of motion and pleas-

ures, S1 is an elective "partner" for a


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woman, her relationship to it allowing her to step beyond the boundaries set by language, and

beyond the pittance of pleasure language allows. An endpoint for men, it serves as an open door

for women. (The difficulty one encounters in attempting to characterize the Other jouissance in

any more concrete way stems from the very ineffability and inaccessibility of S1 qua point of

origin that cannot be directly grasped in any articulable, discursive way).

Feminine structure proves that the phallic function has its limits, and that the signifier

isn't everything. Feminine structure thus bears the closest affinities to hysteria as defined in the

hysteric's discourse (cf. Sem. XVII, L'Envers de la psychanalyse, on the four discourses).

Beyond Biology

Lacan's way of defining man and woman has nothing to do with biology. We have probably all

encountered male hysterics and female obsessive compulsives. A male hysteric has, if my inter-

pretation of Lacan is correct here, a feminine structure: he may potentially experience both phal-

lic and the Other jouissance.

From a clinical vantage point, a great many people who biologically speaking would be

considered female turn out to have masculine structure, and a great many people who biolog-

ically speaking would be considered male prove to have feminine structure. Part of an analyst's

training must thus consist in breaking old habits of thought whereby one immediately assumes

that a female is an hysteric and thereby can be characterized as having feminine structure. Each

person's relation to the signifier and mode of jouissance has to be examined more carefully; one

cannot jump to conclusions on the basis of biological sex.12

The fact that so many people cross over the hard and fast biological distinctions perhaps

explains, in part, the widespread use in America of the category "borderline." It is often precisely

those patients who cross those boundaries who are diagnosed by psychiatrists, psychoanalysts,

and psychologists as borderline.

Lacan's distinctive way of defining masculinity and femininity shows why there is no

such thing as a relationship between the sexes, but this point must await clarification until man's

partner and woman's partners are articulated in more detail below

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THE FORMULAS OF SEXUATION

In Seminar XX, Encore, Lacan provides a schema, part of which he had been working on for

years, and part of which he claims to have whipped up in a flash the very moming before he first

drew it on the board at his seminar.


I'll begin my interpretation of this schema by commenting on several passages from Encore.

Masculine Structure

"We'll start with the four propositional formulas at the top of the table, two of which lie

to the left, the other two to the right. Every speaking being situates him or herself on one

side or the other. On the left, the lower line--��x eex--indicates that it is through the

phallic function that man as whole can be situated.13

The formula ��x eex thus means that the whole of a man falls under the phallic function (x

standing for any given subject or part thereof, eex for the phallic function as applicable to that

subject or part, and ��x for the whole of x).14

To paraphrase this formula, man is altogether

determined by symbolic castration, i.e. every bit of him falls under the sway of the signifier: no

part escapes the law inherent therein. Returning to the quote, we see that there is an exception

however:

". . . man as whole can be situated [as determined by the phallic function], with the

proviso that this function is limited due to the existence of an x by which the function eex

is denied:

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��x ffx. That is what is known as the father's function . . .The whole here is thus based on

the exception--the exception posited as the term that altogether negates eex."

Man can be considered as a whole, because there is something that delimits him (��x, there exists

some x [some subject or part thereof] such that eex, the phallic function, is foreclosed). It should

be pointed out immediately that Lacan was extremely interested in set theory, and that set theory

is directly concerned with problems related to the part and the whole. Man can be taken as a

whole because there is a definable boundary to his set:


It must be kept in mind that Lacan's work on sexual difference is based on and coexten-

sive with his reworking of traditional logic in terms of his own logic of the signifier. A signifier

never stands alone. We would never talk about black if there were no question of white, ie. no

cases in which black was not found. It is because something other than black shows up on occa-

sion that black takes on meaning. It is in opposition to white that the word black has meaning.

While Lacan uses the language of the theory of classes in the early sixties, he continues to de-

velop the same idea in the early seventies in terms of his own unique use of classical logic's

symbols: in L'Etourdit, for example, he says that "there is no universal statement which can but

be controlled through an existence which negates it" (Scilicet 4, p. 7). In other words, every uni-

versal claim is grounded in the ex-istence of an exception which proves the rule, to paraphrase a

well known French maxim.15

Man's essence (as wholly, universally defined by the phallic function) thus necessarily

implies the existence of the father. Without the father, man would be nothing, without form

(informe). Now the father as boundary (to pursue the simile) occupies no area: he defines a two-

dimensional surface within his boundaries, but fills no space. This father who marks the limit of

a man's manhood is not just any old father: Lacan associates him with the primal father presented

in Freud's Totem and Taboo--the father of the primal horde who has not succumbed to castration

and supposedly

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controls every single woman in the horde. While all men are marked by symbolic castration,

there nonetheless exists or persists one man to whom the phallic function does not apply, one

man who was never put into his place by succumbing to symbolic castration. He is not subject to

the law: he is his own law.

Does this primal father, seemingly asserted to exist in Lacan's upper formula for masc-

uline structure (��x ffx) exist in the usual sense? No, he ex-ists: the phallic function is not simply

negated in some mild sense in his case, it is foreclosed (Lacan indicates that the bar of negation

over the quantifier stands for discordance, whereas the bar of negation over the phallic function

stands for foreclosure); and foreclosure implies the utter and complete exclusion of something

from the symbolic register. As it is only that which is not foreclosed from the symbolic order that

can be said to exist, existence going hand in hand with language, the primal father--implying

such a foreclosure--must ex-ist, standing outside of symbolic castration. We obviously have a

name for him, and thus in a sense he exists within our symbolic order; on the other hand his very

definition implies a rejection of that order, and thus by definition he ex-ists. His status is prob-

lematic, and Lacan might have qualified him as extimate back in the 1950s: excluded from

within. He can, however, be said to ex-ist because, like object (a), the primal father can be

written: ��x ffx.

Now the mythical father of the primal horde is said not to have succumbed to castration,

and what is symbolic castration but a limit or limitation? He thus knows no limits: according to


Lacan, the primal father lumps all women into the same category: accessible. The set of all

women exists for him and for him alone.

His mother and sisters are just as much fair game as are his neighbors and second cousins. The

effect of castration is to divide that mythical set into at least two categories: accessible and inac-

cessible. Castration brings about an exclusion: mom and sis are off-limits.

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But castration also changes a man's relation to even those women who remain accessible:

they become defined in a sense as simply not off-limits. In Encore, Lacan says that a man could

only really "jouir d'une femme" from the position of non-castration. Jouir d'une femme means to

get off on a woman, to really enjoy her, to take full advantage of her, the implication being that

one's pleasure really comes from her, not from something one imagines her to be, wants her to

be, fools oneself into believing she is or has, or what have you. Only the primal father can really

get off on women themselves. Ordinary masculine mortals must resign themselves to getting off

on their partner, object (a).

So only the mythical primal father can have a true sexual relationship with a woman. To

him there is such a thing. Every other man has a "relationship" with object (a)--to wit, fantasy--

not with a woman per se.

The fact that every single man is nevertheless defined by both formulas--one stipulating

that he is altogether castrated and the other that some instance negates or refuses castration--

shows that incestuous wishes live on indefinitely in the unconscious: every man, despite cast-

ration (that splitting up of the category of women into two distinct groups), continues to have

incestuous dreams in which he has the privileges of the imagined pleasure-finding father who

knows no bounds.16

Speaking in quantitative terms for a moment, Lacan can also be seen to be saying here

that while there was once upon a time an exception to the rule of castration, you can be abso-

lutely sure now, whenever you meet a man, that he is castrated. So you can safely say that all

people who are men, not in biological terms, but rather in psychoanalytic terms, are castrated.

But while men are wholly castrated, there is nevertheless a contradiction: that ideal of non-

castration--of knowing no boundaries, no limitations--lives on somewhere, somehow in each and

every man.

Masculine structure can, to modify the first graphic illustration provided above, be

depicted as follows:


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S2 corresponding to ��x eex, and standing for the son here, and S1 corresponding to ��x ffx and

standing for the father.

This partial presentation of the formulas of sexuation should already make it clear to what

an extent Lacan's discussion of them is multilayered, involving logical, Freudian, and linguistic

material. His explicit work on these formulas dates back at least as far as Sem. XVIII, D'un dis-

cours qui ne serait pas du semblant 1970-I971), and continues almost uninterruptedly into the

mid-1970s (Sem. XXI, Les non-dupes errent).

Feminine Structure

As for the two formulas defining femininity, we find firstly (��x eex) that not all of a person who,

regardless of anatomy, psychoanalytically speaking falls into the women's camp is defined by the

phallic function: not all of a woman falls under the law of the signifier (��x, not the whole of x [a

given subject], or not every part of x, such that eex, the phallic function, applies to x). Lacan does

not put it positively by stating, for example, that some part of every woman escapes the reign of

the phallus; he leaves it as a possibility not a necessity, but a possibility that is nevertheless deci-

sive in the determination of sexual structure.

The second formula (��x ffx) states that you cannot find even one woman for whom the

phallic function is totally inoperative: every woman is at least in part determined by the phallic

function (��x, there doesn't exist even one x [a subject or part thereof] such that eex, the phallic

function, is inapplicable to it). This is a reminder again that whereas classical logic is primarily

concerned with all and some, Lacan's logic is radically different, and adopts a good

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deal of the language of set theory insofar as it refers to parts and wholes.17

Were the phallic

function to be totally inoperative for a subject, he or she would be psychotic. The kind of image I

find useful in illustrating the two formulas for feminine structure is the tangent curve


where, at PP/2, the curve goes right off the map and then mysteriously reappears on the other side.

We can attribute no real value to it, and are forced to resort to expressions like the value of y

approaches positive infinity as x goes to PP/2 from 0, approaching negative infinity as x goes

from PP to PP/2; no one really knows how the two meet up, but we adopt a system of symbols with

which to talk about it. The status of this Other jouissance, experienceable by those who fall into

the feminine category, is akin to that of the value of the tangent curve at PP/2. It goes right off the

scale, right off the nice neat map of representation. Its status is akin to that of a logical exception,

a case which throws into question the whole.

The formula ��x ffx summarizes, in a sense, the fact that while not all of a woman is de-

termined by the phallic function (��x eex), to assert the existence of some part of her that rejects

the phallic function (i.e. to write ��x ffx) would amount to claiming that something that says no

to the phallic function is nevertheless subject to it, situated within the symbolic order--for to exist

is to have a place within the symbolic register. Which is why Lacan never claims that the femi-

nine instance posited to go beyond the phallus exists: he maintains its radical alterity in relation

to logos, to the symbolic order as structured by the phallus. While denying the existence of this

"realm beyond the phallus", ��x ffx does not, as we shall see further on, in any way deny its ex-

istence.18

Woman is thus not somehow less "complete" than man, for man is whole only in relation

to the phallic Junction.19

Women are no less "whole" than men except when considered in terms

of the phallic function; women are no more "undefined" or "indefinite" than men except in rela-

tion to the phallic function--that inextirpable third term.

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Partners?

Consider now the symbols or mathemes, as Lacan calls them, located under the formulas of

sexuation: here we see that the La crossed out--symbolizing, in one sense, that woman is not

whole--while linked (by arrows which indicate Woman's partners) on the one hand to ee(phi, the

phallus) is linked on the other to S(�), the signifier of a lack in the Other (A for Autre, Other).


The Phallus: One of Woman's Partners

What is the phallus? The phallus is a signifier that stands for that part of a mother's desire that

goes beyond her child. The child notices, much to his or her dismay, that mom is not always

present, and that even when she is, her child is not always the center of her attention. She is

clearly interested in other things20

--people, objects, and activities--and that interest (in something

else) is symbolized by the phallus.

The phallus is a signifier: the signifier of desire itself. And insofar as desire is by its very

nature in flux, in motion, the phallus might be characterized as the signifier of the desire for

something else, of the inexhaustibility, the transfinite resourcefulness of desire--in the sense of

its permanent striving towards, its permanent pursuit of, its state of ever-readiness, alertness,

arousal, its unflagging erection. Desire, thus, as both absolute and insatiable.

That signifier occupies a privileged position in the signifying order: when it is opera-

tionalized, a child need no longer perceive its mother simply as a demanding Other, but as a de-

siring Other--an Other thus who is not and cannot be comblé (fulfilled, rendered complete) or

satisfied by the child alone, but who is instead in search of something else. The mother's desire

paves the way for her child's: the one-dimensional field of demand opens up onto a new endless

vista: the realm of that inexhaustible, "unpindownable," wild goose chase named desire.

That one signifier allows all of the transformations to which desire is subject to take

place: the slippage from one object or

75

person to another (metonymy) and the substitution of one object or person for another (meta-

phor).21

Which is tantamount to saying that that one signifier permits the full blossoming of the

powers of language. Demand implies a kind of fixity or congealment (demand always being for

the same thing) that can only be superseded with the help of this one signifier. Without it, a child

is likely to remain caught at the stage of autism. This one signifier is thus, in a sense, the struc-

turing principle of the signifying order itself. There are, nevertheless, degrees of access to this

signifier; I have argued in a paper on Hamlet that the drama in that play turns, according to

Lacan, on Hamlet's partial and problematic access to that signifier, which alone would allow for

his separation from his mOther.22

The more complete a subject's "accession" to this signifier,

the better the articulation of his or her desire, the fuller his or her capacity for action, and the

greater his or her separation from the Other in all its avatars: language, mOther, father, state, law,

religion, etc.23

S(��): Woman's Other Partner

Looking back at our table, we see that women, while "coupled," on the one hand, to the phallus,

are also inextricably "tripled" (troisées) to what points to a lack or hole in the signifying order.

That lack is not simply the lack--directly correlated with desire--that shows that language

is ridden with desire and that the Other is lacking, i.e. that one's mother or father, as avatars of

the Other, is not complete and thus wants something. For the signifier of that desire-implying

lack (or lack-implying-desire) would be the phallic signifier itself.


There is thus another facet of the Other as barred that is brought into play here, and a first

gloss might be that of primal repression as the origin or anchoring point of the symbolic order,

i.e. the necessary "disappearance" of something so that that from which it disappears can come

into being: the exclusion of something from the symbolic order upon which the whole of that

order is based. Primal repression consists, according to Lacan, in the abduction of S1, the unary

signifier--different from all other signifiers--which is not "part" of the symbolic order. Now S1

and S(�) are birds of a feather, even though they are not always equated in Lacan's work.

Looking once again at the mathemes in the table, it can be observed that all the elements

found under men seem directly related to the symbolic order, while all of those under women,

76

while in some way related to the symbolic order, are not properly within it.

Object a is that part of the real around which the symbolic runs circles in an attempt to avoid it,

La stands for Woman insofar as she cannot be adequately defined using language, and S(�) is

excluded from the symbolic. In fact, it is not difficult to see that all of the mathemes under

women are inscriptions of the real.

Allowing us to say that a woman has, in a sense, a foot in both doors: one of her partners,

ee, is nicely situated in the symbolic, while the other, S(�), goes beyond the symbolic or is the

beyond of the symbolic itself. ee here can also be equated with S2 (just any signifier), and S(�)

with S1 (the Other--or "one and only", i.e. unary--signifier). Man remains confined within the

field covered by ee, his only "access" to the real being via object (a), his partner, which he is only

able to find in the woman's camp24

; woman's access to the symbolic perhaps requires a relation

to the phallus via man, but her access to the real seems more "direct" through S1 necessitating no

recourse whatsoever to man.

A Dissymmetry of Partners

As I indicated earlier, Lacan set out to show (1) that the sexes are defined separately and differ-

ently, and (2) that their partners are neither symmetrical nor overlapping. Man's partner, as seen

in the above table, is object (a), not a woman as such; object (a) may take the form of a breast,

glance, voice, etc. A man may thus get off on something he gets from a woman: a certain way

she talks, a certain way she looks at him, etc., but it is only insofar as he has invested her with

that precious object that arouses his desire. He may thus


77

need a (biologically defined) woman as the substratum [support], prop, or medium of object (a),

but she will never be his partner.

Nor will he ever be hers as such: she may require a (biologically defined) man to embody

the phallus for her, but it is the phallus and not the man that will be her partner.25

The break or

dissymmetry is even more radical when it comes to her Other partner, S(�) or S1, as that partner

is not situated in the male camp at all, and thus a woman need have no recourse to a man to

"relate" to it. Lacan even goes so far as to say that, while phallic jouissance is sexual, this Other

jouissance is asexual. Thus while a woman would have access to sexual (phallic/symbolic)

jouissance via ee, she could also potentially have access to a non-sexual type of jouissance via

S(�). Lacan relates this Other jouissance to religious ecstasy, but a discussion of this connection

will have to wait for another occasion.

Had men and women's sexual partners turned out to be identical--had, say, object a func-

tioned as the sole partner for both of them--at least their desire as sexed beings would be struc-

tured in some sort of parallel way, and we could try to envision a sexual relationship between

them on that basis. But the dissymmetry of their partners is utter and complete, and no conceiv-

able relationship between the sexes can thus be postulated, articulated, or written in any form

whatsoever.

Differential Splitting and Discourse Theory

Men and women are alienated in and by language in radically different ways, as witnessed by

their disparate relations to S1 and S2. Which means that, as subjects, they are split differently and

this difference in splitting accounts for sexual difference.26

Sexual difference stems from men

and women's divergent relations to the signifier. This can be stated in quite a number of ways:

men and women are castrated differently, men and women are alienated differently, men and

women are split differently. It all comes down to the same thing.

Now if splitting is a linguistic operation, there must be differences in the way men and

women view, use, and/or embody language. The formula ��x eex (pas-tout) suggests that women

are not wholly under the sway of language, and yet many of them are subject to "hysterical

conversion"--psychosomatic pains and paralyses localized in accordance with common

conceptions of body parts, rather than with true anatomical considerations.27

What

78

better proof that women too are ruled by language, and that their bodies are written with

signifiers?

And yet there are certain things about men and women's language use or discourse that

are rather different. Their divergent discourses can be examined using some later developments

in Lacan's algebra where the unary signifier, S1 came to be identified as the "master signifier," a

sort of primordial, isolated signifier that makes its stand alone, calling upon no other signifier to

establish its dominance. S2 came to be associated with knowledge, reason, a sort of stock of all

knowledge, useful in rationalization.


Looking at men and women's discourses with these two concepts in mind, we can, for

example, view S1 as the truth of man's discourse: it is, as we saw earlier, a possible translation

for ��x ffx (there exists one x, one instance in which the phallic function is inoperative). Every-

thing in man's discourse can be viewed as a desperate attempt to cover over that sore point, that

impossible-to-attain ideal position of the master. ��x eex (for every x, the phallic function is

operative) corresponds in a sense to S2: man as dominated by the law of the signifier, reason,

knowledge, rationality, rationalization. Stated in this way, masculine structure (and obsessive

neurosis) seems to correspond to the university discourse, presented by Lacan in Seminars XVII

and XX:

Î�ÏFather - ��x ffx - S1

Son - ��x eex - S2

S1, as it functions in the master's discourse, runs counter to the notion that there is such a thing as

reason or truth; will alone prevails: "you'll do what I said because I said so." Men would love

(unconsciously, for the most part) to find a master to obey, but they would also love to overthrow

the master and occupy that position of absolute authority themselves. Hence the quandary. In

both cases, however, S1 is the key.

What about women s use of language? women's discourse? Consider the hysteric's

discourse: Ð�Ñ79

Women's discourse is not structured in the same way at all. Women are not in search of

rationalizations for S1, the master's word. A man takes S1 for granted. It is the nec plus ultra, the

ultimate, the endpoint or even navel of his wildest dreams. It is in a sense what holds him to-

gether: it's that which makes him whole, as in S1 he finds his limit or boundary. A woman does

not find her limit in S1, it is not the be all and end all for her. Rather she sets S1 at some distance

from herself and interrogates it: "so what if you say so!--give me one good reason why I should

believe much less obey you!"

Hysterics are the living proof that there is no necessary stopping point in the search for an

absolute: a woman may search indefatigably without ever encountering something that can serve

the same function as S1 does for a man. Which can at times function as a source of anxiety and at

others as a source of ecstasy.

In the hysteric's discourse, the split subject occupies the dominant position, and addresses

itself to S1, calling it into question. Whereas the university discourse takes its cue from the mas-

ter signifier, glossing over it with some sort of trumped up system, the hysteric goes at the master

and demands that he show his stuff, that he prove his mettle by producing something serious by

way of knowledge. Her discourse is the exact opposite of the university discourse, all the posi-

tions being reversed. The hysteric maintains the primacy of subjective division: the contradiction


between conscious and unconscious and thus the conflictual, or self-contradictory nature of

desire itself.

In the bottom right-hand corner, a position Lacan variously refers to as product, produc-

tion or loss, we find knowledge (S2). This position is also the one where Lacan situates jouis-

sance, the pleasure resulting from a discourse, and Lacan thus suggests here that an hysteric gets

off on knowledge. Knowledge is no doubt eroticized to a greater extent in the hysteric's dis-

course than elsewhere. In the master's discourse, knowledge is prized only insofar as it can

produce something else, and yet knowledge itself remains inaccessible to the master; in the

university discourse knowledge is not so much an end in itself as that which justifies the aca-

demic's very existence and activity. Hysteria thus provides a unique configuration with respect to

knowledge, and this is why Lacan finally identifies the discourse of science with that of hys-

teria.28

Ex-istence Revisited

Given Lacan's many seemingly paradoxical statements involving existence--"Woman does not

exist," "The Other jouissance does not exist"--and involving il y a and il n'y a pas--"There's no

such thing as a sexual relationship," "Il y a de l'Un," "Il n'y a pas d'autre de l'Autre"--I'd like to

add a final word about Lacan's notion of ex-istence.

To the best of my knowledge, the word "ex-istence" was first introduced into French in

translations of Heidegger (e.g. Being and Time29

) as a translation for the Greek ekstasis and the

German Ekstase. The root meaning of the term in Greek is standing outside of or standing apart

from something. In Greek, it was generally used for the "removal" or "displacement" of some-

thing, but it also came to be applied to states of mind which we would now call "ecstatic." Thus a

derivative meaning of the word is "ecstasy," hence its relation to Other jouissance. Heidegger

often played on the root meaning of the word, "standing outside" or "stepping outside oneself,"

but also on its close connection in Greek with the root of the word for "existence." Lacan uses it

to talk about "an existence which stands apart from," which insists as it were from the outside.

Something not included on the inside, something which rather than being intimate is "extimate."

The Other jouissance is beyond the symbolic, standing apart from symbolic castration. It

ex-ists. We can discern a place for it within our symbolic order, and even name it, but it never-

theless remains ineffable, unspeakable. We can consider it to ex-ist because it can be written

��x eex.

While Woman does not exist, as she cannot be adequately defined by/within language, she ex-

ists as she can be written under erasure: Woman.

Sexual relationships, however, are distinct in this respect--they cannot be written, and

thus neither exist nor ex-ist. There's simply no such thing: isn't that what so many patients have

been saying for so many years?!

Footnotes

1. The material contained in this paper served as the basis for lectures given at Cornell, Yale,

UCLA, and UC Irvine and in London and Melbourne since 1987; an early version of it appeared in the

Newsletter of


81

the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research, London, England, 10, 1988.

2. Emptiness: A Study in Religious Meaning, Frederick J. Streng, Abingdon Press, New York,

1967, pps. 215-217.

3. Consider, for example, what he wrote about time (Ibid, p. 205):

1. If "the present" and "future" exist presupposing "the past."

"The present" and "future" will exist in the "the past."

2. If "the present" and "future" did not exist there [in "the past"],

How could "the present" and "future" exist presupposing that "past"?

3. Without presupposing "the past" the two things ["the present" and "future"]

cannot be proved to exist.

Therefore neither present nor future time exists.

6. Since time is dependent on a thing (bhava), how can time [exist] without a

thing?

There is not any thing which exists; how, then, will time become [something]?

4. Modern logicians have arrived at similar conclusions, but by a rather different path. They can

be understood as saying that contradictions appear when our logical and mathematical systems are pushed

to the limit, such that no matter how rigorously we define the terms of a philosophical system, it will have

limits; it will not hold up in every case. Everything seems to work fine for the most part, but exceptions

always crop up, regardless of the seeming simplicity and elegance of our axioms.

This way of stating what modern logicians (such as Russell and Gödel) have discovered allows us

to associate it with that which, in Lacan's system, goes hand in hand with the incompleteness of the Other

with a capital O: object (a). Object (a) can be understood as the anomaly: the catalogue of all catalogues

which don't include themselves, whose status is indeterminate (for if it includes itself, then it shouldn't,

and if it doesn't, then it should); that statement in an axiomatic system which leads to a contra-diction, or

which is formally undecidable. Object (a) is the limit of a formal system, the place where language as a

system breaks down. Unlike Buddhists and skeptics, many modern logicians haven't disqualified the

whole of a system thereby, but merely pointed out every system's radical incompleteness.

� a

5. Cf. Lacan's discussion of the expression, "la paix du soir" in Seminar III, Les psychoses, pps.

156-157.

6. My translation.

7. The paradox in his poem is much the same as that found in Lacan's discussions of the Other

jouissance: St. John of the Cross tells us that it is unspeakable, but he says so in so many words! Lacan

tells us that the Other jouissance is unnameable, and yet he names it in a sense (denouncing as a mis-

nomer so-called vaginal orgasm as opposed to clitoral). A

82

similarly paradoxical situation arises in the case of object (a): just as Lacan puts forward object (a) as the

breakdown of language itself, and as such an aspect of the real as the impossible, as that which does not

work, at the same time Lacan talks about it and discusses it from every angle, explaining its avatars, its

effects, etc. ad infinitum. The seeming paradox will, I hope, no longer appear paradoxical by the end of

this paper.

8. This sentence, based on the better known "l'analyste ne s'authorise que de lui-même" (an

analyst's only authorization comes from himself, an analyst is only authorized by himself, or the only

authorization one has to be an analyst comes from oneself), can be rendered as "One's only authorization

as a sexed being [male or female] comes from oneself."


9. The translation I am proposing here for Lacan's oft-repeated "il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel".

Note that I have been unable to find a way in English to sidestep the problem of using the verb "to be" to

translate the phrase. Lacan's "il n'y a pas" here is stronger than saying "Sexual relationships do not exist,"

implying as well that "Sexual relationships do not ex-ist either"; rather, "There ain't no such thing." This

point is taken up later in the article; here let me simply say that Lacan uses two different kinds of formu-

lations for two different notions: when he says "L'Autre n'existe pas" we can still suppose that the Other

perhaps ex-ists, but when he says "Il n'y a pas d'Autre de l'Autre" he does not leave us the option of spec-

ulating whether or not this Other of the Other (beyond or outside of the Other) might in fact ex-ist: it

neither exists nor ex-ists.

10. It should be kept in mind here that Lacan's writings are notoriously open to interpretation,

and that the interpretation provided here is my own; moreover the material laid out here constitutes a

punctuation of Lacan's work in that in the present version of this paper I am leaving aside a parallel gloss

Lacan gives concerning his formulas of sexuation which seems to me (1) to distract from his most in-

cisive and far-reaching conclusions about sexual difference, and (2) to have been superseded in the course

of Lacan's own work. His parallel gloss is not without interest (and the reader is referred to my earlier

paper mentioned in footnote 1 for a detailed discussion of it), but strikes me as somewhat less useful.

11. This view of object (a) is at work in Lacan's postface to "The Seminar on 'The Purloined

Letter"'; I have discussed it at length in "The Nature of Unconscious Thought, or Why No One Ever

Reads Lacan's Postface to "The Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter"', a lecture given at the Lacan Seminar

in English in Paris in June 1989.

12. An interesting conclusion is that one could go so far as to say that the analyst, qua analyst, is

sexless. The same holds true for the master.

13. All translations are my own, unless otherwise indicated.

14. Readers familiar with the quantifiers

��

and

��

should realize right from the start that Lacan's

use of them deviates quite significantly from current usage in logic; in particular, he uses

��

x variously to

mean all x's and the whole of x at different times. His adoption of a different symbolism

83

for negation should also be understood as implying something other than the simple ~ used in symbolic

logic; the different meanings of the bar of negation when placed over the quantifier and over the function

are briefly outlined below

15. And thus it seems there must be an exception to the universal claim just enunciated! Lacan

echoes Charles Sanders Peirce here who wrote: "a rule has no meaning without a limit."

16. It should be kept in mind that these formulas were constructed for neurosis not psychosis; if

such dreams or fantasies were acted upon, we would no longer be in the realm of neurosis.

17. This is completely lost in the current English translation of the chapters of Sem. XX, Encore,

included in Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose's Feminine Sexualiiy, Norton, 1982.

18. Just as

��

x

ff

x in the case of masculine structure, does not in the end posit an existence but

rather an ex-istence. It could thus be argued that in Lacan's symbolism, as opposed to classical logic's,

��

means "there ex-ists an x," while

��

x simply denies the possibility of x's existence without stipulating

anything about its ex-istence.

19. He is certainly not whole in any other sense without his partner, object (a), and the plenitude

achieved when he is united with his partner remains phantasmatic at best (� a).

20. A mother whose desire is fixated solely on her child creates no other space, no elsewhere,

and the child becomes trapped in a dual relationship that is bound to lead to psychosis.

21. I am certainly playing a bit fast and loose with Lacan', work on metaphor and metonymy in

the 1950s, for at that stage of his work the phallus appears as a signified, i.e. a signification or meaning


(cf. p. 557 Ecrits); my presumption here is that in the later Lacan, the phallus as signifier of desire has

very close ties with the Name-of-the-Father, to the point, at times, of being indistinguishable therefrom.

22. That paper, "Reading Hamlet with Lacan", will appear in a volume edited by Richard

Feldstein and Willy Apollon in 1992. On separation, see "Alienation and Separation: Logical Moments of

Lacan's Dialectic of Desire," Newsletter of the Freudian Field, 4, 1990.

23. This notion of "access or accession" to a particular signifier does not strike me as terribly

straightforward, but I cannot here account for it any further.

24. A pervert may find it elsewhere than in the woman's camp, which is why a pervert, though

biologically speaking male, would probably not be characterized by masculine structure.

25. It seems clear from analytic experience that there is a tendency "in relationships for a man to

become equated with a signifier and a woman with an object.

26. We know from other parts of Lacan's work that splitting is specific to neurotics: the existence

of subjectivity, which is a result of splitting,

84

is doubtful in the case of psychosis. Lacan throws into question the very possibility of there be-ing such a

thing as a subject when the individual in question is psychotic. And we know from Lacan's work that

psychosis is a result of a failure to instate the Name-of-the-Father. The father's name, not so much in the

form of a name like John or Bill, as in the form of the word "father" itself, with all it denotes and connotes

in our culture, has never been assimilated by the individual. The Name-of-the-Father, in Lacanian terms,

has some sort of linguistic existence--as a term in language, a word--and yet it cannot exactly be pinned

down to any one given word; i.e. it has some sort of more structural function that allows it to act as an

anchoring point for a subject. It is the condition for the very possibility of subjectivity.

Psychotics are not split subjects; it is not clear in what sense they can be taken as subjects at all.

Neurotics, on the other hand, come in a number of different varieties, and in particular masculine and

feminine. The variety seems to stem from their different ways of splitting, their different types of relat-

ionships to language. That is what Lacan seems to be saying with his formulas of sexuation.

27. Many people suffer, for example, supposed heart pains in the left side of their chests, even

though the heart is in fact located right in the middle of the chest.

28. See in this connection "Science, Knowledge, and Truth," a paper I gave at UCLA.

29. Interestingly enough, Heidegger seems to introduce the notion in relation to time, and his

discussion thereof could be fruitfully compared with Nagarjuna's which I quoted at the beginning of this

article. Consider, for example, the following passage from Heidegger's The Basic Problems of Phenom-

enology, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1982, pps. 266-267: "The essence of the future lies in

coming-toward-oneself; that of the past [having-been-ness] lies in going-back-to; and that of the present

in staying-with, dwelling-with, that is, being-with. These characters of the toward, back-to, with reveal the

basic constitution of temporality. As deter-mined by this toward, back-to, and with, temporality is outside

itself . . . Temporality as unity of future, past, and present does not carry the Dasein away just at times and

occasionally; instead, as temporality, it is itself the original outside-itself the ekstatikon."

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